Morning After: The Nintendo3DS

In case you guys weren’t paying attention to anything going on in the world, Nintendo’s latest handheld, the 3DS, was released at 12:00am this morning to all us lucky North Americans. After all the craziness of the night, how does the system hold up, you know, the morning after?

Me and Evan’s Gamestop experience was a unique one. When we got there (before midnight) everyone had gotten their 3DS’ and were chilling on the floor playing their games and exchanging friends codes. We were committed to recording an unboxing video, so we were patient and waited until we got home and then broke that bad boy open!

After the crazy 3DS extravaganza, I uploaded some Youtube videos and passed out around 4am. Fun night, right? Well after I woke up, it was time to break down the 3DS without the party-high of the previous night.

My general impressions of how the actual system looks and feels are positive. The 3DS actually has a kind of blocky feel to it, which I really like. It definitely has a nice weight to it, and feels a bit better in my hand then the DSi did. The stylus is a total bitch to get out though, having a very hard to access tip to pull on, and also being located on the back of the system instead of the side.

To get this out of the way: yes, the battery life is abysmal. It got me maybe 3 and a half hours (MAYBE) with half of that being 3D gameplay, and half being 3D off. I imagine if you throw on power saver mode, turn off 3D, and turn down the brightness, you can get a reasonable 7 or so hours. All that is a bit of a hassle though.

As for built in software: no matter how you look at it, its all awesome. Face raiders is incredible, and I had an awesome serial-killer moment when I got to look at my “face collection”. The AR games are also really neat, allowing you to throw down some Mario, Link, or Samus statues, and then changing their poses to take pictures with. All simple stuff, but all really fun.

The Mii Plaza has been revamped and now actually includes little games with it, which is badass. The only problem is, so far as I know, you need to Street Pass with some of 3DS’ to get access to the Mii Plaza games. May be a little hard for me, but I’m sure if I creep around the local mall for a few hours or something, I may pick up some stray Miis.

One last thing is the Friends List. As unbelievable as it sounds, Nintendo did get this 100% right. Excluding the friend codes, its just as good as any modern console’s friends list, allowing to me to see info on my friends as well as what they’re playing. If you’d like to add me to your 3DS list, just @ me on twitter, @ALFighter27.

Overall the first impressions of the 3DS are great. I love the feel of the system, but there are things that will drive me nuts eventually. One of those may be the backwards compatibility. If you haven’t seen it yet, attacked is the video me and Evan did showing off a DS game on a 3DS. You may not be able to tell in the video, but it don’t look good.

Stay tuned for more 3DS coverage, as well as my full review in the coming weeks.

Alex is the Editor-in-Chief, overlord, and overall master of Irrational Passions. He loves JRPGs, Persona 4 Golden is his favorite game ever, and he hopes to take on a full-time editorial role at a video game outlet someday.

Check out IGN’s walkthrough on how to play DS games on your 3DS. Boot up the system by holding down Start and Select as well and it will play your DS games in the correct resolution. Your clearly doing it wrong as the screen is only half-full.